PESHAWAR, Pakistan – As Afghanistan gets ready to start counting votes Wednesday from a historic presidential election, after several key candidates threatened to declare the poll illegal, Afghan refugees living in Pakistan were confident incumbent president Hamid Karzai would become the first-ever legitimate head of state and speed up efforts for much-needed peace in the war-torn country.
"Definitely, Karzai will win. The other candidates cannot match him. Karzai’s past is clean, while his opponents have indulged in the bloodbath of their countrymen in one way or the other," said 70-year-old Noor Jamal, an Afghan refugee who now resides in border city of Peshawar
"We voted for peace, which can be possible when Karzai becomes president," Jamal told IPS.
Yasmin and Saeeda, two Afghan women refugees at the Shaiekhabad camp said they voted for Karzai "because he’s liberal and we like him."
Saira, their 40-year-old mother, said she also voted for Karzai because she wanted to put an end to her country’s bloodshed.
At the same camp, Khadija, 25, was quick to respond on why she voted for Karzai.
"You see, Afghanistan is marching toward progress. For the first time in the country’s history women are allowed to participate in the Loya Jirga [Grand Assembly]," she told IPS.
"Under Karzai, the situation with regard to women’s rights would be improved," added Khadija.
Other male candidates, she said, tend to "humiliate" Afghan women.
Apart from the millions of Afghans who voted in their homeland, about 850,000 refugees living in neighboring Pakistan and Iran also voted – the largest out-of-country election ever.
Afghan refugees first fled to Pakistan in 1978, after a communist government seized power in Kabul. The influx mushroomed after the then-Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in December 1979, growing to more than four million in the 1980s.
In the mid-1990s, the radical Islamist Taliban faction seized control over southern Afghanistan and Kabul. Taliban offensives in northern Afghanistan in the late 1990s sent hundreds of thousands of new refugees into Pakistan and Iran and displaced large numbers of people within Afghanistan.
International bodies have endorsed the elections, with the largest monitor group – The Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan – describing them as "fairly democratic."
An exit poll conducted by the Washington-based International Republican Institute, a U.S. think tank associated with President George W. Bush’s Republican Party, showed Karzai heading for a landslide.
Karzai, a member of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group – the Pashtun – was picked to head a transitional government after the Taliban militia was ousted by U.S.-led forces, at the end of 2001, for refusing to hand over al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
On Saturday in the Afghan capital Kabul, 15 opposition candidates complained of fraud when washable ink rather than permanent ink was found to have been used to mark voter’s fingers. As a result, reports of multiple voting were widespread.
But the tension was diffused on Monday when key candidates threatening to boycott the result were promised an independent United Nations investigation of any irregularities.
The Afghan-UN Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB) is setting up a panel to investigate. Privately, election officials say few votes were fraudulent and would have no major effect on the poll.
The candidates welcomed the investigation.
"We [will] accept the results of the investigations, whatever it be," said Abdul Hadi Khalilzai, a presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, officials from the Afghan elections board said ballot boxes are being moved from 34 provinces, Iran and Pakistan to eight regional counting centers.
The transfer of ballot boxes from Kabul polling stations, Maidan Wardak, Panjshir, Parwan, Logar, and Kapisa, and of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran will be gathered for counting in Kabul’s Taj Big Hill.
Qutbuddin Qayem, of the Afghan election board, said it may take a lot of time to collect the boxes. The election results will be announced after three weeks, he said.
In Kabul, U.S. ambassador Zalmai Khalilzad met with the candidates about their complaints.
Masouda Jalal, a presidential candidate, said she and the others talked to Khalilzad, the European Union and the election board. "We discussed the election day, our problems, and our views on the way to solve them," she told Pajhwok Afghan News.
Shereen Bibi, a 20-year-old Afghan student in the posh University Town area of Peshawar, while rejecting the poll rigging charges and the subsequent boycott, told IPS: "Two of the presidential candidates, Abdul Hasib Aryan and Syed Ishaq Gilani, have already withdrawn their candidature from the race, while the others, who announced the boycott on election day did so, because they had seen the writings on the wall."
On Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan congratulated Afghans on "their patience, resilience and civic maturity" during the presidential election process that culminated in Saturday’s vote.
Annan said the inquiry into reported polling irregularities will ensure that the procedures are more reliable for local and parliamentary elections scheduled for next year.
In a message to the Afghan people, read out on local television and radio by his special representative in Kabul, Jean Arnault, Annan said they had shown a welcome determination "to take charge of the affairs of their country."
